McAdams - Bon courage : rediscovering the art of living in the heart of France

BON COURAGE

Rediscovering the Art of Living

IN THE HEART of FRANCE

KEN MCADAMS

illustrations by

MARIAN BING BINGHAM

Copyright 2010 by Ken McAdams
Art (inside and cover) 2010 by Marian Bing Bingham

FIRST EDITION

This book is based on real events, involving real people, but the names of those people and the places the events occurred have been changed to protect their privacy. Many conversations replicated in English actually occurred in the French language and the translations presented in this work are only approximations, though their content is appropriately representative.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McAdams, Ken.

Bon courage : rediscovering the art of living in the heart of France / Ken McAdams ; with illustrations by Marian Bing Bingham.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-55921-398-1 (alk. paper)

1. Toulouse Region (FranceSocial life and customs. 2. Toulouse Region (France)Description and travel. 3. City and town lifeFranceToulouse Region. 4. McAdams, KenHomes and hauntsFranceToulouse Region. I. Title.

DC611.T718M35 2010
944.739dc22

2010002310

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Printed in the United States of America

First, to Bobbye who believed from the beginning, but didnt live to see the dream come true. And to our kids, Lexi and Brit, who endlessly had to hear the promise, Yes, we will do that after the book sells, which never sold. Despite those unfulfilled promises, they still loved their dad. And finally to Bing, who picked up my broken pieces, so ably helped pull them back together, then pitched in with her brush and pen to add the pictorials my words were not enough to fully convey, becoming such a strong part of BON COURAGE.

Dr. Judith Briles who found me Eric Kampmann who gave me Margot Atwell (Associate Publisher), Erin Smith (Director of Marketing), and Trish Hoard (Editor), along with Gordon McAdams of Radio Boston, who never stopped saying, Yes you can! And, of course, the late Vernon Scott and Cecil Scott, both masters of the edited word.

MUCH OF this story began one Sunday after a church luncheon. I was helping clean the kitchen with Clare, a beautiful, very tall blonde married to Bill, a friend of mine. I have a terrible time with tall blondes. When I was twelve years old, the girl next door was four or five inches taller than me and blonde. I could run faster and out-wrestle her; still, she could hit a baseball farther. She was my first love. To kiss her I had to stand at least one step up on her front porch. It was painfully demeaning. I never got over it. So, talking to the charming, yet towering Clare, I blurted out, Dont you have a regular-sized sister around somewhere? She stopped drying the plate in her hand, looked slightly down for a moment as a smile played around the corners of her mouth. Then, turning and unfortunately looking still further down at me, she said, Actually, Ken, I do.

A week later, at Clare and Bills Halloween party, I met Regular-Sized Bing. My costume was that of a man run over by the tractor-trailer of life, while hers was a smart suit and the guarded face of a survivor. I learned that though shed lost a marriage, after getting her kids off on their own, shed gritted her teeth, saying to herself, Okay, thats that, now Im moving on. She went back to college, finishing her long-delayed BA, then added a Masters in Art, graduating both magna cum laude! Today she is a talented and successful artist who graciously agreed to illustrate this book.

MY QUESTION to Clare had come about three years after leukemia made me a widower and the bankruptcies of Pan Am and Kiwi International Airlines ended my flying and executive careers for good. Then my brother died. Not long after that my literary agent dumped me on the basis that, though he thought I wrote well, without more blood and guts in my stuff, he didnt see me selling beyond paperbacks, and he couldnt feed his wife and kids on the royalties they bring in. My new life as a writer, after forty or so years as an aviator, also seemed dead in the water.

So here I was, having been a husband for thirty-five years, still deeply in love with the wife departed; my brother gone; a pilot without an airline; an executive without a company; and a totally rejected writer. I was on a roll of sorts but one that left me empty. The needle of my emotional gauge was near zero, my spirits running on fumes. I began to wonder what the hell life was all about. I prayed a lot. I went to church a lot, even became active in its leadership, but I was still alone until my question to Clare in the kitchen.

From our first meeting, it was clear to me that Bing was not one to suffer whiners. I kept my mouth shut about my troubles for a couple of weeks. Then I broke that silence, not to whine, but to ask her to marry me. She accepted! At our ages, with new careers to pursue, neither of us felt time was on our side. Why wait?

I sold my house, moving out of Chappaqua, in New Yorks Westchester County, about the time the Clintons moved in. Bing put her farm in eastern Connecticut up for sale. We needed to start fresh with a nest of our own. We bid on a rundown place in Greenwich, Connecticut, one we thought would be a cinch to rehab. The house was Bings find. I didnt like it for its closed-in 1950s interior and its yard resembling a mini landfill, but it was within walking distance to town. Bing and the realtor said, Forget how the house looks right now; in real estate its all about location.

We found an architect and a contractor. Gutting and reconstructing the house was predicted to take six months. It took nearly two years. One fiasco after another led us to feel like wed hired Laurel and Hardy. For that matter, the sub-contractors could have been out of the Three Stooges shop. The various town inspectors werent much better.

For starters, no one thought to file for a building permit! So we lost all the subcontractors, costing us months. Then, when we had inspectors out to evaluate the existing underground oil tank, they said it was okay. A week later the same crew returned for the final approval but declared the tank faulty. With some agitation I asked how one week it was okay and the next it was not? With a straight face, the lead guy said, That was then. This is now. Hey, shit happens. We switched to town gas.

When the electrical inspector came by he failed our new wiring. I asked him to show me what was wrong with it. In the basement he pointed to a cluster of cut-off bare wires. I admitted they looked scary, but following them back a few feet, I showed him they were cut at that end too and simply had not been pulled out and thrown away. Since he was embarrassed, we had to wait weeks for his sensitivities to sort themselves out and his final sign-off to be recorded.

Before the master bathrooms marble floor was laid, I tore up a section of old subfloor that looked suspicious. Laurel and Hardy had told me not to bother. When it was out of the way, however, we found a major support joist wasnt even attached at the end where the new floor would be laid. If the marble had gone down without that joist attached, the whole bathroom could have ended up in the dining room.